


Highway of Time

by Fridge4422



Series: Theme park [2]
Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Multi, Sequel to another work
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-20
Updated: 2019-01-24
Packaged: 2019-10-13 02:02:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17479118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fridge4422/pseuds/Fridge4422
Summary: A sequel to "Theme Park", we find out what happened afterwards.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Make sure you read "A theme park" first, so you'll actually know whats happening.

The fire hadn’t given up just yet.

Scout’s exhausted mind was no match for the fatigue that eventually drowns out everyone. Delayed as it was, however, due to their situation.

He remembered Ms. Pauling sitting in the chair in front of her, but when he was awoken by the lights and hums of engines, she wasn’t to be seen.

Black vehicles with unmarked license plates has their passenger doors refract the light of the fleeting moon. He must have been out only for a short while.

Men dressed in combat uniforms quickly leaped from the vehicles and hustled to the increasingly dim flames burning the remnants of the RV. Without the notice of vehicles, he might have not seen the all black dressed soldiers.

The only indicator they were not masses of darkness were the insignias on their shoulders, three arrows pointing inwards on a circle, with three words underneath he could not decode in the distance.

The stuck their rifles into the cabin, nearly blinding Scout in the face. He was yanked from his seat and onto the ground outside by the back of his shirt. The clinking of his dog tags were small whimpers, the sound masked by the excessive coughing in Scout.

The men surrounded him, rifles all aimed and in a perimeter of a ten-foot radius. All facing in.

Two men holstered their rifles in exchange for Tasers, the wires shooting through the air and connecting with Scout. The electricity forced him to the ground where two more soldiers hauled him into the back of a van.

The doors quickly shut behind him, and as Scout shakily tried to get himself up from the floor without vomiting, the vehicle jolted forward, sending him to the locked metal doors behind him.

Scout managed to lean himself on one of the side doors, the only illumination of light coming from the moon through narrow slits of window at the top of the walls.

Scout tilted his head toward metal, beyond which the cabin of the Van housed the driver. Any attempts to communicate were futile.

“Who are you?”

“Where is she?”

“ ** _WHERE ARE YOU TAKING ME!?”_**

He received nothing. Ms. Pauling, the only face he could trust, was no where to be found. Did she leave him to die? Did she get captured too?

Was she…?

No. No No NO.

She wasn’t a thing. She couldn’t have been. Ms. Pauling couldn’t.

Although he was trying to convince himself to the fullest extent she was alive, his mind wouldn’t let him.

Engineer, Smartest person he knew. Assimilated.

Medic, the only one who knew what was happening before it was too late. Dead.

Heavy, a damn near invincible tank, Assimilated.

What made Ms. Pauling different from them? She was likely to be as dead as anyone else.

Scout was alone. The only thing to keep him company was the noise of the engine and slight shuddering on the metal material encasing him.

For the first time, Scout didn’t have any words. All he could do, was cry.

 

The vehicle moved slower with each passing moment. The moonlight still shined dimly through the clouds, not being interfered by any other light.

The vehicle slowed to a halt, and the engine silenced itself as the driver and passenger solider exited the vehicle. Scout could hear the footsteps outside carve a pathway to the back of the van, as the door to the back opened, and he was dragged onto the road pavement.

One of the soldiers held him up as the other injected him with a syringe, one he inferred was filled with sedative. Within seconds, Scout passed out.

He was still somewhat conscious. He felt the cold air whip into him with the wind, and his legs trudged along in the sand.

The rest was a blur, with bright lights, distant sounds of mechanical machinery, his mind wasn’t present to make sense of any of it.

He eventually awoke to bright lights persisting into his eyes from above, illumination working him up to regain energy. He looked up from a metal table he had his head rested against, the nerves of his right arm stabbing at the lack of circulation.

The room was illuminated to the point of annoyance, the white walls giving him a sense of unease. To his left stood a black window from his perspective.

His instincts tried to jolt him up as a means of escape, but he was stopped short by restraints on his wrists and ankles. Metal chains clinked with each movement but offered no capitulation.

Before long, the door on his right opened and shut, letting through a middle-aged black man with a lab coat. He took a seat in front of Scout before putting a pair of glasses on his face, scanning through a collection of papers.

“How are you, Jeremy?” the man said, while simultaneously pulling out a small recording device onto the table before turning it on.

“Where the fuck am I?” Scout spat out. The doctor looked up at him. “We’ll get to that later, what I need to know is what happened.”

Scout’s impatience grew. “Were you the fuckers behind that Thing?”

The Scientist, who had returned scanning the documents, quickly tossed them onto the table. Scout could see they were incident reports, most likely about what he experienced.

“Tell me what you know about this, “thing” as you call it”

Scout stopped for an answer. “It-It imitates people, you cant tell whose real or not. It got-“

Scout fell silent. “It got all of em.”

The doctor’s lips pressed together before he glanced down at the floor. He took off his glasses to clean off some smudges accumulated upon them with his coat.

“We searched a wide area of where we found you. A total of 14 bodies, 8 original people. The rest were imitations or already “Things”. The doctor pressed on. “We have incinerated whatever is left of it.”

The doctor made took some notes down on a workbook already bursting with words and symbols he couldn’t decipher. Scout’s dyslexia was sometimes a real pain in the fuckin ass.

“The problem is, we need to know who “she” is. One of the guards reported you wanting to know where she was. Problem is, we never found anyone alive besides you, and all the bodies were either imitations or male. We have helicopters, planes and vehicles searching the entire Mojave for…”

The doctor’s voice fell short, and his gaze met Scout’s.

“It.”

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

Scout went into denial. Even with seeing his many friends torn to pieces by something not even the top of the line scientist in front of him could even begin to understand, he still clung onto his fantasy.

Ms. Pauling was invincible, he thought.

Of course, it would be only rational from him. Scout’s mind isn’t well into critical thinking, as his earlier life prioritized kicking ass than passing class. The doctor, after saying his remarks and asking a few more mundane questions, returned to filling pages of his notebook with intellectual crap.

The scientist abruptly dropped his pencil into his shirt pocket and closed his workbook and glanced towards the black window. The black man gave a quick nod and left without speaking.

“Hey, where are you goin?”

The scientist didn’t pay Scout’s words any mind.

“You cant just keep me here!”

Andrew closed the door behind him and locked it securely. The solitary door reinforced with steel, which looked out of place with the pale white and grey walls that encompassed the corridor, couldn’t fully drown out Scout.

Andrew walked a few feet over to the second, tamer door in the observation of the interrogation room. When he entered and closed the door behind, he was only greeted with his other scientist, Quinn.

He met Craig during his first few weeks as a researcher, when he first began to imprint the motto of the company into his mind. “Secure. Contain. Protect.”

If only the world knew what they were containing.

Craig was a tall man, with his hair done in a neat combover. He was a bit on the skinny side, something their overweight peers loved to poke fun at. Quinn was a pretty good sport about it, and the conversations between them were pretty hilarious.

“Hey Craig, wanna know why I’m so fat?”

“Why?”

“Because every time I fuck your mother, she gives me a cookie”

That one line spread around the facility and stayed for months, it sometimes even got in the way of productivity. His train of thought was interrupted by Craig.

“What do you think Andrew? Permanent containment?”

The remembrance of laughter was overthrown by the sudden realization of what his job was. Permanent containment? Sure, if this knowledge got out it would spread into mass panic, but it still didn’t subside the nagging thought of letting this kid rot in a cell for the rest of his life.

“Andrew?”

Quinn snapped him out of his trance into Scout, who was currently twiddling his thumbs and mumbling to himself.

“Yeah, permanent containment is our only option. The foundation would have our ass if we let him leave.”

“Amen to that, Drew.”

Quinn unclipped the paper from the clipboard his had been writing on, while holding his right hand out for Andrews report, filed them all together in one folder, and tucked them neatly.

“I’ll get this to Steven, he’ll most likely want more interviews with him.” He pointed towards Scout. “Get all the knowledge of “-1” you can. We should have terminated it when we had the chance.”

Before he closed the door, Andrew put on a mockery of Steven’s voice. “It’s a major Scientific Discovery!”

With a light chuckle from them both, Craig left the observation room, leaving him alone with Jeremy. He was a man of Science with all due respect, but when it came to this, “thing”, a lot of his fellow man recommended termination. But Steven didn’t want to listen. He had people to please, funding to catch, even if it meant risking the whole damn facility.

It wasn’t even playing with Science, it was playing god.

 

Mere hours before, Scout was shit-faced with his friends around a booth in an RV. Now he was locked in against his will. No alcohol. No booth. No RV. No Friends.

Scout pieced together the memories of it. How he could have saved them if he done this instead of that, using the power of hindsight to ridicule himself.

Was it his fault? What would he do now?

Scout just wanted them back. He wanted desperately to go back and run, scream, kick, cry, anything to keep them from going on that road.

Why him? When it was all going so perfectly? He was enjoying the relationships of his friends when it all came to shit. The worst part of it all was he was powerless to do anything about it.

And Ms. Pauling was still out there, either a thing or not. He couldn’t tell which was worse.

 

 


End file.
